Cecil Taylor RIP...

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Absolutely DISAGREE with his "worth" re Mingus! That NY Review of Books profile is really interesting, in what shaped Taylor and his "outsider" status. And it's NOT just the music.

What is interesting is that Tommy Flanagan appreciated Taylor, TF the guy with exceptional taste and touch. Taylor rejected "touch" etc as white and western. As I said, I think Cecil maybe "protests" a tad too much. Again, "not the Messiah". Not even close. And certainly not Herbie Nichols...

[Serial_Apologist]

This is a really good article and the YouTube clip with Taylpr playing at Ornette's memorial service is fantastic:-

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/cecil-taylor-cecil-taylor-by-john-eyles.php

Not liking either Mingus or Miles is probably not really indicative of someone's personality when both characters were notoriously abrasive. It makes you curious to learn what Taylor thought of Keith Jarrett!! I would also go along with the idea of Ornette being a "country boy" simply because his music is so indebted to the blues. If you can get Charley Patton, it is not too much of a step to get Ornette Coleman. I would also say that Cecil Taylor grew up in an environment that was steeped in an approach more aligned with the conservatoire whereas Ornette only really reached out towards composition / orthodoxy through the auspices of Gunther Schuller.

I have got to say that I feel that Taylor was pretty unique amongst the avant garde players of that generation insofar that he was coming from a more Classical tradition whereas others such as Ayler, Coltrane, Shepp and Coleman arrived through jazz and, in the case of Ayler, was looking backwards to earlier styles of music. Taylor's approach was refracted through a conservatoire approach and maybe should be looked at more akin to Anthony Braxton. Oddly, Braxton and Taylor are the primary jazz musicians from that generation who still sit at odds with the jazz establishment and remain resolutely avant garde. They have never crossed in to the mainstream in the way that Ayler and Coleman have, for example. I am not a massive fan of Taylor nor totally familiar with his music but I would recognise him as probably one of the most important 10 musicians in jazz and probably unrivalled on his instrument from a technical perspective even if I am resolutely a Herbie Hancock fan. Cecil Taylor raised the bar for what could be expected of the piano yet it is a challenge that relatively few have taken up.

I also appreciate that Taylor divided other pianists. I have heard / read adverse comments from the likes of Dick Hyman and Kenny Barron so not all musicians were convinced. It is not simply a matter of pinning the negativity on the coterie of musicians surrounding Wynton Marsalis (I wonder , though, whether he might be coming around to recognising Cecil Taylor's importance.) I think that there are quite a few jazz pianists from the mainstream who acknowledge his importance to the genre.

The other pianist most frequently named in the obituaries to Cecil Taylor is Bill Evans with the former being the latter's most fierce critic. I also understand this because the two pianists are at the polar opposites of the spectrum. It does interest me as a debate because I would tend to side with Evans' harmonic approach being the more appealing solution to tackling the problems presented by the piano as a jazz instrument. However, it is almost a non-starter insofar that Taylor really explored the full potential of the instrument in a fashion that did not interest Evans and which few other pianists previously had been willing to tackle. It is a really interesting argument because the debate operates on so many levels and Taylor just trumps Evans on everyone of them in my opinion even though it initially infuriated me to encounter another musician dismiss Bill Evans so categorically:-

1. Harmony - Evans' model inspired by Chopin / French Impressionism against Taylor's often atonal approach and indebtedness to Duke Ellington. I just feel that Tylor was far more open-minded albeit it is fascinating to contrast Taylor with someone like Herbie Hancock who basically picked up the baton from Evans and ran with it much further.

2. Range of use of the instrument - Evans' almost total exclusion of the bottom and top 1/4 of the piano keyboard to concentrate of those notes in the middle that accentuate the sophistication of his harmony. Taylor embraced every component of the piano including the inside and employed all 88 keys.

3. Evans' reliance on Broadway repertoire and simpler forms versus Taylor's abandonment of form.

4. Timbre / dynamics - Evans worked within a restricted dynamic range, Taylor went for everything.

What is interesting for me is that so much "good" came out of Evans' approach to piano and you can really see him as the turning point at which pianists moved away from Be-bop. The alternative route offered by Cecil Taylor is so radically different and in contrast to Evans you can understand his total rejection of everything Evans stood for. Taylor was extremely condescending about Evans' abilities as a pianist but his standards were extremely high and very few people could attain them. It is often difficult to "love" Taylor's music but is does fascinate and deserves at least equal footing to Miles and clearly surpasses anything Mingus ever produced to take Bluesnik's examples. I think that perhaps he was the messiah despite not being too familiar with his music. Taylor is the apogee of improvised piano playing. It is difficult to make a case for Ornette, Shepp, Ayler, etc, etc being as "advanced " musically as Cecil Taylor and I don't think people will actually understand his music for at least another 20 years. He will be another Herbie Nichols - a player whose approach to music will take ages to assimilate.

I think Nichols just suffered marginalisation, for one reason or another, not just or even mainly for musical reasons. Like Twardzik. And Taylorites have argued that he didn't actually abandon form, just found more spontaneous ways of devising it - speaking of proliferating embryonic cells the way others describe Bartok's middle-period methods, which also possibly gives something away about Taylor's approach.

Otherwise as far as you go what you've written here is spot on in my opinion. Why Cecil Taylor took the route between genres, both at their most advanced in technical terms, at the time he did is as interesting as, some would say more interesting than, the "shock of the new" of his developments in themselves. Watching last night's excellent documentary "On Tap" showed the extent to which the inculcating of simplistic unthinking aesthetic value judgements onto American consumerism to produce in Marcusian terms one-dimension mindsets for streamlined production-into-instant-consumption lines in the name of "national culture" had benefitted white popular musicians and bandleaders by profiting at the expense of innovations wrought amid racially hostile conditions often literally in the firing line. By and large, with a few exceptions such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell in the 1920s, it was not white Americans but rather Europeans for whom, apart [sic] from jews, colour was not the pressing issue in dealing with the flotsam and jetsome-strewn wake of C19 Romanticism. But at the same time as their expansions of the permissible in musical form and expression were therefore their model if not motivation for breaking the shackles in favour of something authentic in its complexity, black Americans were seeking a form of social, racial and political engagement that would be consciousness-raising in a more inclusive sense of mind-enriching than engagement on merely bread-and-butter issues - that old Leninist propaganda versus mobilisation pseudo-distinction critique of New Left post-Fanon etc thinking - one that precluded, pro tem, at any rate, explicit acknowledgement, since such would be gifted to purveyors of the idea of western "supremacy" in terms of artiistic ie cultural advance.

Others will doubtless disagree here, but the kind of "intellectual obfuscation" involved in not saying too much in fear of clouding pressing issues would be the emotional trigger behind the voiced views of those arguing to counter aesthetic compromise of the kind they would have seen Bill Evans as representing. Michael Garrick, a post-Bill Evans musician who knew Evans, always preferred keeping his powder dry in discussing Cecil Taylor, saying "You really need to talk to John Taylor about Cecil as he has more of an understanding of him than I do" - which was interesting in view of JT's strong Bill Evans affiliation and generationally closer association with the American scene than Mike's. Miles, along with his not always commercially successful choices of direction, would eventually plump for the populist route for which he clearly felt he had earned the reputation to try and re-shape in line with the new directions set by radical Funk a decade after Cecil Taylor; Herbie Hancock and others would profit genuinely thereby, of course, and through the likes of him what we think in terms of a broad mainstream of contemporary jazz has burgeoned along a middle way Hancock would welcome as a good Buddhist!

If one sees the black American avant-garde of the 1960s as more united in terms of forging alternatives to the then commercial pap masquerading as the main American musical culture than divided over idiomatic issues (not "niceties!") one can appreciate a post-Ornette era trumpet player such as Lester Bowie's defense of the later Miles against the young Wynton's disparaging Miles for having lost his way, in terms of the compromise with the complex issues involved which I've tried to outline that Marsalis's turning the clock back represented.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

OK, here's a really heretical suggestion, Cecil Taylor, for all his professed "afro American" stance, was actually the most "white"? The Boston conservatory, Bartok, the admiration for Brubeck et al? Ornette changed this music incalculably. Taylor ...

[Ian Thumwood]

OK, here's a really heretical suggestion, Cecil Taylor, for all his professed "afro American" stance, was actually the most "white"? The Boston conservatory, Bartok, the admiration for Brubeck et al? Ornette changed this music incalculably. Taylor ...

I don't disagree with this statement and alluded to similar sentiments in my previous post.

If you are looking for a better parallel with Mingus in contemporary jazz, I would cite William Parker who had produced a similar fine body of work. I also thin that Parker is a very good bass player and he has, of course, also worked as a sideman with Cecil Taylor.

Mingus does share some interesting characteristics with Taylor. Both had a profound affection for the music of Duke Ellington and Mingus also flirted briefly with more composed music in the mid fifties. I am sure that I have read somewhere that Mingus disliked the avant garde and I cannot see him particularly caring for Taylor's music. Personally I find Mingus a real curates egg. There are some records I really enjoy whereas others seem to be hit and miss. I don't feel he was that consistent and perhaps did not reach his full potential. I have heard the Mingus Big Band on a couple of occasions and have been blown away by their music. They are surely one of the best live gigs to attend in the last 20- odd years. One of the gigs include arrangements Mingus wrote in the late 40's which sound like Ellington and showed little leaning towards Be-bop. His later stuff with Dolphy seemed to push the boundaries but, again, the music ranges from blues through to standard song form. Even the jazz standards he composed are pretty traditional even if it is impossible not to marvel at his most perfect record, "Mingus, ah hum." However, his ambitions were far more modest than Cecil Taylor even if they are much more approachable. I am by no means a fan of Cecil Taylor but I feel he was a hugely important player and on a par with Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane and Ornette. The fact that his music seems so "difficult" puts most of his work out of the reach of most jazz fans but I do not feel this should diminish his reputation as he probably envisaged free jazz far more fully than any other musician of than generation. I still find his music a big challenge despite having a pretty broad taste in jazz.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Just a footnote but the source who claimed that Cecil was considered for the 60's Miles band was William Parker. Who probably got it from Taylor, who was probably still smarting, years on, at Miles' put down. Lots of very "unprovables" in all this. I don't believe a word of it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Just to add a bit of heresy on my own part, could it not be that Mingus was in some ways miffed at the idea of being displaced historically in the jazz scheme of things? Hurt amour propre? He himself said he had originated what others had taken further, I remember reading somewhere.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"Pithecanthropus Erectus". Coincidentally, I've just read a 1963 Downbeat interview with Jackie McLean (who incidentally much admired and referenced Taylor even then), in which, playing with Mingus he would sometimes ask, "what's the key of this?" "And the chords"? Mingus would say there are none, just play. And as JM himself says, it took him a long time to stop inserting standard changes on some of his own, more "advanced" pieces.